Death Tide

by Devon C. Ford

  The woman, moving jerkily and uncertainly like a drunk, clambered to her feet in a very unladylike manner, which forced her tight skirt up to the tops of her thighs and flashed a swathe of skin-coloured stocking tops to the world. She didn’t care, and if she had, then Kimberley would probably have found that disturbing as the priority. Should the woman be aware of anything, it would be the small loop of what Kimberley could only guess was intestine that flopped from under her white blouse to hang just below her crotch. Swallowing a mouthful of bile, she watched as the woman began to take awkward, halting steps, to follow the direction of her head turned up the street towards where the commotion had washed like a tide. What Kimberley couldn’t see was the sudden milky white colour of the woman’s eyeballs, and what she couldn’t hear was the hissing, rasping noise she made that was quieter than the others around her, as a hole had been torn into her windpipe and it allowed some of the air to escape and lower her volume controls. As she stumbled away from the bank and left the street below empty, Kimberley stayed glued to the window for more long minutes, until the dull roar of lots of engines echoed through the town.

  Being so high up, that floor didn’t have the reinforced glass of the ground and first floors, so she was able to open the window. She began to scream for help at the top of her voice and ignored the protestations of those behind her. She was finally rewarded with the four camouflaged metal wedges shooting off from their stationary points and coming towards her. Within seconds they had stopped outside the bank, and a hatch popped open for a man with a handlebar moustache under his helmet, and wide eyes. He seemed to speak to himself, then she watched as the other three tanks moved position slightly before cutting their engines. The man shouted a question up at her, forcing her to turn and call for quiet as she performed a rapid head count and turned back to the window.

  “Fifteen of us,” she called down, making sure to clearly enunciate each word and remove the need to repeat the information.

  “Can you get out of this door?” he asked, pointing at the main entrance to the bank. She responded that they could.

  “Wait there,” the man said after listening to his radio, or at least she imagined that was what he did as his eyes glazed over and he placed a finger to the earphone nearest his right hand, “and cover your ears.” Then he looked forward and dropped down, pulling the hatch closed behind him.

  Kimberley didn’t have the luxury of time to relay that instruction, but human nature being what it was, they all dropped to the ground and covered their ears, screwing their eyes shut tightly as though that would help, when the world outside and below them erupted into a storm of metal and noise and devastation. The automatic gunfire didn’t last long, a few seconds at most, but the shouting that followed was more insistent than before. Getting to her feet and looking back down to street level, she saw four soldiers burst from the nearest tank and run just out of sight. The noise of an engine starting was loud in the street, but the strong voice cut through that din to give her orders.

  “Move, now,” it yelled, as though she were a raw recruit in need of toughening up. She turned and relayed those orders, surprising herself with how authoritarian she sounded, and saw the confidence of those orders translated into instant action as the fourteen other people ran to obey. She was the last one down the stairs, her eyes resting on the partly open drawer which she knew would contain stacks of crisp banknotes and shook her head to will away the ridiculous and improper thought as soon as it came to her.

  Running down the stairs and into the lobby of the bank, she found the others milling about uncertainly as they waited for someone to tell them what to do next. Kimberley hurtled past all of them, pausing only to shout, “Come on!” and to spark them into life to follow. She burst through the doors and into the street, her head acquiring the noise of the engine and seeing the source for the first time. A dirty white Ford panel van, the back doors wide open and some cardboard boxes visible inside, stood thirty paces away with three soldiers waving them frantically towards them. The fifteen survivors piled in, the doors were shut, and a hand banged on the thin metal side twice.

  Maxwell recalled his dismounted troopers, bar the one who had been given the responsibility of driving the van full of civilians, and Johnson watched as his assault troop made its way back toward him, comprising an additional vehicle. Nodding his appreciation for a job well done, he turned his attention back to the rearguard. Calling the Sabre troop up on the radio, he asked for a report, learning that the remaining crowd of enemy had followed them slowly and were approaching their position.

  “On me,” he instructed, telling the drivers of the Fox cars to make the return journey through the obstructions of biting meat that used to be people. “We are leaving via an alternative route,” and with that, he relayed his orders to the rest of the column and decided to get the hell out of the town.

  The commandeered panel van sat neatly in between the two high-roofed tracked vehicles of Johnson’s HQ troop, and the assault troop continued as vanguard. They did not stop to lay down any fire as the enemy never threatened the safety of their convoy at any point. Instead, Johnson called their retreat under a new protocol, this time meaning that they did not stop for anything and no vehicle was ever out of visual contact with those in front and behind, and at a maximum of half their vehicle’s effective range of weapons fire. In a town, that meant that they were driving as fast as their tracked and heavy-wheeled mix of cars could manage, but when they hit the wider roads of the outskirts, they pushed their speed up to just over fifty miles per hour.

  Calling a stop at the very edge of the built-up area, Johnson faced a dilemma. That dilemma was whether to retain personal control of the tip of his spear and remain with a troop, or to return to base and debrief the civilians to formulate a longer-term plan. He knew what he should do, but that would mean leaving a fighting troop under the technical control of an officer he didn’t trust to get a drinks order right. Making his decision, he dismounted his own vehicle and climbed down to approach the identical one behind it. Palmer, having heard of the SM’s approach, popped the hatch and also dismounted to speak to the man away from the armour.

  “SSM,” he said in greeting, his face wan and serious for a change, “your suggestions?”

  Johnson swallowed, keeping down the retort that flew to the tip of his tongue, and with it the urge to slap the young man around the head. He didn’t act on those feelings, however, because he recognised that the man was just emulating the behaviour of other officers. To ask the senior NCO for their suggestion was to admit to nobody that you didn’t know the best way to proceed, and you were calling on the experience of a man who would know. That only offended Johnson because when Second Lieutenant Palmer used the term, it implied that he was in overall charge of the squadron. That rankled him and made his words slightly harsher than they would have been, had the boy not tried to play the boss.

  “My orders,” he began, “are that you remain here with One. Sergeant Strauss will be in charge,” he added in a quieter voice as he leant forward to prevent embarrassing the man, “and your task will be to remain here until such time as our half of the column returns to base. If you are engaged during that time, then you are to ensure that no enemy survives the contact before returning. Understood?”

  “Understood entirely,” Palmer retorted with his aristocratic air of condescension, then he turned away, no doubt to relay his orders to his crew.

  Strauss, the third generation of a Rhodesian migrant had, despite his name and heritage, no trace of the accent of his predecessors, but he did bear the genetic traits. Tall and broad, uncomfortably for a man who went to war inside a cramped metal box, his blonde hair was kept short inside his helmet.

  Johnson relayed his orders, adding in the specifics that Palmer didn’t need to burden himself with, lest he gain the incorrect impression that he was in charge of anything, and left feeling satisfied that those orders would be followed.

  “I think these things are attract
ed to noise,” he told Strauss, who absorbed the facts and recent events with no sign of being affected, “so I don’t want to roll our armour slowly back to base and ring the dinner bell. You wait for whatever crowd follows us out of town, then open up on them, 30mm too, just for the noise, then get back via a longer route. And whatever you do,” he added seriously, “don’t let the Lieutenant do anything stupid like order another charge of the light brigade.”

  Strauss understood, and Johnson left with the assault troop and the borrowed van, the occupants of which had been unceremoniously told to stay quiet until they were back at base.

  Strauss was a switched-on and capable man, if not a natural tactician like Johnson. He kept his four Fox armoured cars in tight formation across the carriageway with their engines running, and ordered that the hatches be closed, if only to ensure that Palmer didn’t try to join in the fight, as his vehicle was the only type that couldn’t bring weapons to bear from the safety of the inside. After forty minutes, the distant horizon started to show a dark smear that morphed into an oncoming line of people, all moving slowly and awkwardly. That was their target, and he intended to destroy this crowd before taking a looping journey back to base, and hopefully not to lead any more of them to the fence that ringed their camp.

  The only unexpected issue was that of the two shapes out ahead of the crowd. They had pushed through at a distance the soldiers could not discern and were now jogging ahead of them at over twice the speed of the masses. Their actions were more coordinated somehow, and they were less damaged than the others, which lent them a kind of alertness that could only spell trouble.

  “Sarge?” the driver of Strauss’ Fox called out to him questioningly.

  “I see them, son,” he said in a fatherly tone to soothe the man’s nerves. “Gunner, to your front, automatic fire… go on,” he said, hearing the answer given by the rapid pounding of the big 30mm cannon above their heads. Watching the road ahead, he smiled a grim smile of satisfaction as the leading monster disintegrated in a flash of red mist, leaving a single leg to cartwheel through the air before it landed wetly a good three hundred paces away from their picquet line.

  “All gunners,” Strauss said calmly into the radio, “automatic fire to your front. Go.”

  And the world on the edge of a small rural town erupted into a cacophonous, percussive hell.

  SEVENTEEN

  Peter, in a bizarre form of coping strategy that he didn’t fully understand, was actually enjoying his project. Had he known more about human interactions and had a basic understanding of psychology, he might have recognised that he had gone into a kind of dissociative state, where productivity could mask the feelings that his recent experiences had caused. Those feelings, had he had the luxury of time and safety to replay the events and the emotions that came at each step, would cripple him if he allowed them space in his brain, so he simply didn’t.

  The events of the last week, as obvious as they were, had just happened and were now shut away in a box that he didn’t have to open. It was the only way he could function.

  So instead of curling up into a ball and crying like the child he was, he refused to accept that those things had happened, and gave himself a new reality to deal with. That reality was that he couldn’t go home, that he was totally alone, and that he had to survive by himself. He had to stay away from people, he had to keep to himself, remain as quiet as possible and wait for it all to stop spinning like crazy.

  The last part even he knew was fantasy, but survival without hope wasn’t survival; it was prolonging the process of dying. He had to retain hope that someone would restore order, that the police or the army would come with guns and sticks and make everyone behave again. Even though he hadn’t seen much of the world, either before or after people started biting each other, he knew that there was unlikely to be any safety anywhere else, so he elected to make a home in the place he knew best.

  The first day was spent attempting to weather-proof his new accommodation, having shivered throughout the entire night previously, due to the wind whistling through the cracks in the boards. His way of rectifying this was to rig a series of heavy canvas sheets and nail them into place using the tools he had taken from the shed. These sheets, which he thought had once been ground sheets for large tents, were pulled tightly into position, then nailed into the wood at the corners at regular intervals, so that they formed a secure section that the wind couldn’t penetrate. Inside that section Peter laid down an even bed of hay, then another of the heavy sheets which he had folded over three times lengthways, and he rolled himself on that makeshift bed until he had ironed out the worst of the lumps with his back. Climbing back down the short ladder, he rigged up a simple rope pulley system to allow him to place things inside the large plastic bucket on one end of the rope, before climbing up to his hideout in safety to pull on the rope to raise his haul without the risk of falling off the ladder.

  Finishing these two tasks before his growling stomach reminded him of the other basic needs, he stopped to dangle his legs off the edge of his bedroom, and he ate crisps and chocolate once again. Another thing he didn’t know was the likely side-effects of eating sugar-rich, processed foods when his body wasn’t used to them, mixed with the absence of any useful carbohydrates and fibre. The resulting feelings as soon as he had finished his snack, made him realise another need he had failed to cater for.

  Peter had, at times, been taken hunting and fishing with his father. Those trips, often accompanied by cans of cheap high-strength lager, often imparted some knowledge to the boy. His father didn’t overtly intend this, more that he just spouted more and more rubbish and platitudes the more alcohol he imbibed. But some things had stayed with Peter and they came back to him piece by piece.

  Shape, smell and sound were the main aspects which interested him now; the very fundamentals of camouflage. If a predator made noise or showed its recognisable body to prey, the prey would run away before the hunter could strike. If that hunter approached from downwind, then the prey would also run as soon as it detected the danger.

  “You can tell a lot from an animal by its shit,” his father had told him once, bending to examine a patch of small, brown pellets. “What’s that?”

  “Rabbit?” Peter guessed.

  “Yes,” his father responded, casting his eyes up and scanning the hedgerow closest to them before raising a finger and pointing at a patch of smoothed grass that was shorter than the rest of the field, “and that is why rabbits are just food for other things,” he intoned. “You don’t shit where you eat.”

  With that, he raised his shotgun and took a snapshot at a tight cluster of three rabbits bursting from cover to dash for the safety of their underground warren, and he rolled two of them over in broken ruin with a single shot.

  As the pain in his belly worsened, Peter’s mind ran over and over these concepts of predator and prey until a shocking realisation hit him. All the pearls of wisdom and un-fatherly advice he had been given had to be ignored.

  Ignored because the advice was given to him as though he were the predator, and not the prey.

  He had to stay downwind of them and keep his senses alert for their smell.

  He had to keep his ears tuned to the hissing, screeching noises they made to accompany the irregular shambling of their movements.

  He had to be observant of others and learn to tell in an instant whether they were friend or foe.

  He had to learn to be a clever bit of prey, or he would become a meal for a predator.

  Unable to contain the roiling in his intestines any longer, Peter ran to the small river that flowed along the outer-edge of the farm and dropped his trousers to void himself messily into the shallow water. He watched in mixed awe and disgust as the cloudy patch of water flowed downstream to dissolve and dissipate in the gentle flow. Satisfied that his father had finally taught him something useful, he cleaned himself in the river and returned to his lodgings.

  Now that the issue of shelter had been app
ropriately addressed, Peter turned his attention towards water. The barn he was in had a water collection barrel at the foot of the drainpipe just outside the doors, but he didn’t trust that. Walking a short distance to the nearest outside tap on the wall of a building, he turned it to be instantly rewarded with a jet of clean water. It didn’t occur to him that this magical, endless supply might one day cease to function. After shelter and water came defence; something which Peter had already considered, given his instinctive thought to bring not only the bent pitchfork that he now had an unbreakable affinity with, but also his father’s shotgun. That gun, with its long twin barrels, was taller than Peter when he stood alongside it, and although he knew the fundamentals of how it worked from watching it fired and reloaded so many times, he couldn’t manhandle the long gun with enough strength to bring it to bear. Glancing between the shotgun and the pitchfork, Peter decided to make some necessary modifications to his small arsenal, and to make them slightly more user-friendly for his size.

  One of his favourite places on the farm was the workshop. Like their own shed back at the house, it was stocked with tools, and benches with vices and machines that he didn’t understand. He loved that dirty, oily smell of the building that brought hints of the outside in, because any tractors in need of repair were driven into the empty section of the shop and worked on under the bank of strip-lighting high overhead.

  Peter flicked on the light switch just inside the door, hearing the metallic twanging noise it made as the electricity burst into life. Carrying only the pitchfork, he walked towards the woodwork vice on the nearest bench and spun the handle to open it wider. Then he nestled the long wooden handle of the tool in the neck of the vice between the two scarred blocks of hard wood. Cinching the handle tight, he went to the wall where the wooden backboards had been painted white to allow for the tool outlines to be marked clearly in black pen. He didn’t know if that was to make it easier to find everything, or just to keep track of what they had and dissuade workers from stealing. Selecting a thin-bladed hacksaw, Peter nestled the blade against the metal holding the bent outer tine of the tool, as he stood looking down the length of it. Then he carefully drew back the blade in a straight line a few times to create a furrow that the saw could sit in. With that done, he began to use the hacksaw in long draws, both forwards and backwards, in a rhythmic pattern.